Dugway, about three miles from Isabella, was a vast open area of slickrock that would make a good location.
He glanced at his watch: eleven forty-five. It had been two hours since he sent the e-mail. People would begin arriving at any moment. He began to jog down the center of the road, to intercept any arriving traffic.
About a half mile from the Dugway, he heard the rumble of a bike engine. A single light appeared over the top of the mesa, moving rapidly toward him. The light slowed as the beam illuminated Eddy, and a dirt bike stopped in front of him, driven by a muscular man with long blond hair tied in a ponytail, wearing an unbuttoned denim jacket, sleeves torn off, and no shirt. He had a striking face, craggy, movie-star handsome, with the physique of a god. A heavy iron cross dangled from his neck on a metal chain, nestled on his hairy chest.
As the bike came to a stop he extended two leather-booted legs, steadied the bike, and grinned. “Pastor Eddy?”
His heart hammering, Eddy stepped forward. “Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ.”
The man kicked down the kickstand, rose from his bike—he was enormous—and walked toward Eddy with his arms thrown wide. He enveloped Eddy in a dusty embrace, his body odor overpowering, and then stepped back, gripping him affectionately by his shoulders. “Randy Doke.” He gave Eddy another hug. “Oh, man, am I really the first?”
“You are.”
“I can’t believe I made it. When I saw your letter, I hopped on my Kawasaki and came up from Holbrook. Cross-country, over the desert, cutting fences and riding like hell. Woulda been here sooner, but I took a spill back near Second Mesa. I can’t believe I’m here. Oh, man, I can’t believe it.”
Eddy felt a rush of faith, an inpouring of energy.
The man looked around. “So—what now?”
“Let’s pray.” He clasped Doke’s rough hands, and they bowed their heads. “Lord God Almighty, please surround us with Thine angels, wingtip to wingtip, with their swords drawn to protect us, so that they can lead us, Thy servants, into victory against the Antichrist. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
“Amen, brother.”
The man had a deep, resonant voice that Eddy found reassuring, magnetic. Here was the kind of man who knew what to do.
Doke went back to his bike, pulled a rifle out of a leather scabbard hanging off the seat, and slung it over his back. Hauling out a bandolier packed with rounds, he tossed it over the other shoulder, which gave him the look of an old-time guerrilla warrior. He shot Eddy a grin and saluted. “Brother Randy, reporting for service in God’s army!”
More headlights approached—slowly, uncertainly. A dusty Jeep, top down, stopped next to them. A man and a woman in their thirties climbed out. Eddy opened his arms and took them in, first the man, then the woman. They both began to cry, their tears making tracks down their dusty faces.
“Greetings in Christ.”
The man was wearing a business suit covered in dust. He carried a Bible. Tucked into his belt was a big kitchen knife. The woman had pinned little pieces of paper to her blouse, which fluttered as she walked. Eddy saw they were Bible verses and slogans:
“We prayed and prayed, but we couldn’t decide,” the man said. “Did God mean us to fight with His Word, or did He mean us to use real weapons?”
They stood in front of Eddy, awaiting for orders.
“No mistake about it,” Eddy said. “This is going to be a battle. A
“I’m glad we brought these.”
“A lot of people are going to be coming down that road,” Eddy continued. “Thousands, probably. We need a place to gather everyone together, to prepare. A staging ground. That’ll be that area, off to the right.” He gestured toward the vast expanse of slickrock and sand, pale in the light of the lopsided moon rising over the lip of the mesa. “Randy, God brought you to me first for a reason. You’re my right-hand man. My general. You and I will gather everyone over there and plan our . . . our assault.” It was hard to say the word, now that it was actually happening.
Randy nodded sharply, without speaking. Eddy noticed wetness around his eyes, too. He felt profoundly moved.
“You two need to block this road with your Jeep to prevent anyone from going on to Isabella. We need the element of surprise. Direct everyone off the road and have them park in that open area over there. Randy and I will be on that hill. Waiting. We’re not moving on Isabella until we have sufficient force.”
More sets of headlights appeared at the lip of the Dugway.
“Isabella is about three miles down that road. We want to keep quiet until it’s time to move. Make sure no one jumps the gun or goes off half-cocked. We don’t want the Antichrist knowing we’re coming until we’ve got strength in numbers.”
“Amen,” they said.
Eddy smiled.
56
AT 2:00 A.M., THE REVEREND DON T. Spates sat at the desk in his office behind the Silver Cathedral. Several hours earlier he had called Charles and his secretary at their homes and asked them to come in to handle all the calls and e-mails. In front of him stood a stack of e-mails Charles had culled out before his mail server crashed. Next to them was a stack of phone messages. He could hear the phone ringing incessantly in the outer office.
Spates was trying to absorb the momentous thing that was happening.
A light tap on the door, and his secretary entered with fresh coffee. She placed it on the table, along with a china plate with a macadamia-nut cookie.
“I don’t want the cookie.”
“Yes, Reverend.”
“And stop answering the phone. Take it off the hook.”
“Yes, Reverend.” Plate and cookie disappeared with the secretary. With irritation, he watched her retreat; her hair wasn’t as bouffant and sparkly as usual, her dress was wrinkled, and without makeup her true frumpiness showed plainly. She must have been in bed when he called, but still, she should have made a better effort.
When the door closed, he slipped a bottle of vodka from a locked drawer and splashed some into the coffee. Then he turned back to his computer. His Web site had also crashed under the weight of traffic, and now it seemed the whole Web was getting sluggish. With difficulty he trolled slowly through the familiar Christian sites. Some of the big ones, like raptureready.com, had also crashed. Others were as slow as molasses in Alaska. The uproar Eddy’s letter had generated was astonishing. What few Christian chat rooms were still functioning were jammed with hysterical people. Many said they were leaving to respond to the call.
Spates sweated heavily, despite the coolness of the room, and his collar itched. Eddy’s letter, which he must have read twenty times now, had frightened him. The letter was an incitement to a violent attack on a U.S. government installation and he had named Spates in the letter. Naturally, they would blame him. On the other hand, Spates reasoned, this immense display of Christian power, of Christian outrage, might be for the good. For too long, Christians had been discriminated against in their own country, ignored, sidelined, and mocked. Right or wrong, this uproar would be a wake-up call to America. The politicians and the government would finally see the power of the Christian majority. And he, Spates, had set the revolution in motion. Robertson, Falwell, Swaggart—in all their years of preaching and with all their money and power, none of them had pulled off anything like this.
Spates surfed the Web, looking for information, but all he could find was vitriol, outrage, and hysteria. And thousands of copies of the letter.
A new and disturbing idea suddenly infiltrated his mind as he glanced through the letter yet again.
He felt a sudden chill. He wasn’t ready to let go of this life. He couldn’t bear the thought that all his money, his power, his cathedral, his teleministry might be coming to an end—that it would all be over, before it had hardly begun.
An even more unsettling thought came hard on the heels of this one: in that great and glorious day of the Lord, how would he be judged? Was he truly right with God? All Spates’s sins lurched forward to haunt him. The
